A recent post on the ZFS mailing list mentions the Fantom SR44000E 4TB eSATA External Hard Drive w/2-port PCI-Express Card, being sold at NewEgg.com for $999.99. The odd thing is that the drive is nowhere to be seen on Fantom Drive's own web site. Bad sign or just an older product still being sold? As of this writing, no user comments existed for the item, so it's hard to tell if it's a good deal or not. You might read the user comments on other Fantom products, to help you decide.
Simon Breden blogs about his specs for his Solaris 10 x86 server for ZFS. After looking at drive enclosures, I was curious what his system would cost today. All prices are from NewEgg.com as of April 3, 2008.
As Iook at various products, I'll add them to this page to keep track of what I've considered so far.
| Product | Cost ($) | RAID levels | Host Interface | Drive Types |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| DriveStation Quattro TurboUSB 2.0TB | 950 | 0, 1, 5, JBOD | USB, eSATA | SATA |
| RaidWeb.com SIV73187 | 1295 (no drives) | 0, 1, 5, JBOD, 0+1 | eSATA | SATA |
| DAT Optic qBox-F | 199 (no drives) | 0, 1, JBOD | FW800 | IDE |
| Data Robotics Drobo | 499 (no drives) | 1, Proprietary mixed RAID | USB | SATA |
| Cyberguys 4-drive SATA array | 279 (no drives) |
Cyberguys.com has always been one my of favorite computer parts and accessories vendors. They have good prices, a pretty wide selection and I've never had any problems with ordering from them. They're not quite as big as say NewEgg.com, but Cyberguys tends to have slightly different and interesting products for sale.
One of the enclosures available at Cyberguys is a nameless 4-bay eSATA enclosure (item# 163 0333). It's only $279 and comes with a RAID controller card (not as much use to me, if I'm going to use it on a Mac, but might be handy if I ended up using a Solaris x86 setup).
(If you're interested in a USB version of the same enclosure, it's only $199.00)
The Data Robotics Drobo, despite the "storage robot" marketing label on it, isn't anything like what you might think of from a hacker/sci-fi movie where the robotic arm is swinging around in a see-through cabinet. (Those are usually giant tape library systems and not hard drives). But the company has managed to draw a fair amount of interest in the Drobo. MacBreak provided some video coverage of the Drobo products at 2008 MacWorld:
Cali Lewis looks at the Drobo at MacWorld 2008
While this is no way a web-design blog, I have to note that the Drobo web site is nice and well laid-out. Their product works with Windows and Mac OS, but you get the feeling that they strive to be very Mac-like (which is in no way a bad thing). Definitely a nice site to browse, compared to the usually sparse looking sites of other vendors.
The Drobo is small compact shiny black box that holds 4 SATA drives, which are easily hot-swappable; no brackets or any screws required, just slot them in. The faceplate is magnetically attached to the case, so it's very simple to replace or add drives. The unit is $499 and that is without drives. It only has USB to connect to the host system, but there's an optional Network Attached Storage (NAS_ attachment for $199 which will make the Drobo network-accessible.
This Firewire-800 external drive enclosure from DAT Optic, model qBOX-F looks kind of tempting. The bare enclosure is $199.00. Internal interface is IDE unfortunately, although the asterisk-footnote says you can use SATA if you use a IDE-SATA bridge.
DAT Optic qBox-F drive enclosure
So the next question is, how much of a performance penalty for using the bridge? This article from May 2003 from TechRepublic states:
The problem with bridge controllers is that they eat up bandwidth, and quite a lot of it: on a 150 mbps-rated device, a bridge controller may leave you with only 70-80 mbps bandwidth.
